Sun, 10 Feb 2008

The Great Ocean Rd drive had been lovely, but now my plans took me
away from the coast and north, to the national park known as the
Grampians.

I didn't know much about the Grampians -- going there was a whim.
My Australian wildlife book
said it was a good place to see kangaroos, emus, and koalas, and that
as an island of old sandstone sticking up out of a sea of younger
basalt terrain, they had a lot of relict species which aren't seen
much in other parts of Western Victoria. Beyond that, I knew nothing.

I didn't have much of a road map, either. Although the Grampians are
more or less straight north from Warrnambool, the maps I had weren't
entirely clear about how to find the highway going north to Hall's
Gap. But it looked like it should be easy -- just find the highway
going to Dunkeld (one of the maps even had the highway number) and
if I kept going past Dunkeld, eventually I'd end up in Hall's Gap.
Easy!

So I headed west out of Warrnambool, keeping an eye open for the
highway numbers. Nothing for a while, then a sign for a highway
heading toward Caramut. I stopped and checked the map; Caramut was
the next town east of Dunkeld, so I figured the next highway would
likely be my turn-off.

A few miles later, I saw another highway sign ... but it was for
Hamilton, the next town west of Dunkeld. Hey, wait a minute! What
happened to that highway on the map that went straight to Dunkeld?

So that's how I found myself sailing along on one-lane unmarked
country roads in the pleasant farming country north of Warrnambool.
It's all bucolic green rolling hills and fields dotted with big hay rolls,
crisscrossed with relatively straight roads. The roads reminded me
enough of California's central valley (though the Victoria terrain
here was much greener and prettier) that I felt relatively sure
I'd be able to find my way in the right direction eventually.
(We'll just ignore for the moment my skewed sense of direction caused
by the sun being in the wrong part of the sky.)

After the road narrowed to a single lane, I quickly learned the
protocol for oncoming cars: slow down barely at all, edge over onto
the wide, smooth left shoulder and keep driving. The other car does
the same, and everything works out fine.

Gradually, I saw the tips of the rocky crags that must be the Grampians
looming out of the haze far ahead. I started seeing Dunkeld signs,
and after a few twists and jogs, I arrived at Dunkeld itself, a tiny
but picturesque looking town in the Grampian foothills, one just large
enough to have a cafe where I was able to get a latte for the road.

North of Dunkeld the terrain becomes more winding and wooded, with
vaguely exotic looking trees just different enough from the eucalypts
we're used to in California that it looked a bit exotic. I'd been
keeping my eyes peeled for roadside kangaroos all along, without
seeing one, but I did see some road wildlife -- something that looked
like a big stick lying on the road, until I realized the big stick was
moving -- rather rapidly -- across the road. I slowed enough to make
sure I avoided the blue-tongue lizard and watched it disappear in the
roadside brush. Besides the one blue-tongue and the constant presence
of sulfur-crested cockatoos in the trees above, the woods were
remarkably quiet.

The last part of the road to Hall's Gap follows the valley between
two high ridges of upturned sandstone. In a way it's reminiscent of
the drive from Banff to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies -- of course the
elevation and climate are totally different, but there's the same
striking sense of following the trough between two adjacent up-tilted
hogbacks. You can see that in aerial photographs (my wildlife book had
one illustrating the Grampians) but I didn't expect it to be so
obvious from the road. (I later had excellent looks from the other
end, from some of the park lookouts north of Hall's Gap.)

And before long, I arrived at Hall's Gap. I checked in to the
apartment I'd booked; then since it was still quite early in the day,
plenty of time for a hike, I backtracked to the park visitor's center
to inquire about trails.

On the ranger's advice, I made the hike to "The Pinnacle", a
relatively hike over sloping and pitted black sandstone, winding
through a slot canyon and up onto a clifftop.
There were lots of other
hikers on this popular trail despite the steep climb and the hot
weather, and everyone exchanged cheerful words of encouragement and
tips ("There's a nice cool spot to rest just a little way ahead",
"You're almost to the top!"). The view at the end was spectacular and
well worth the climb, with panoramic views of
Hall's gap, the long valley between the two upraised ridges, and the
farmland stretching for miles to the east.

Happy but thoroughly overheated from the hike, I took a quick shower
then whiled away the time before dinner exploring some of the
park's scenic overviews, during which time the weather clouded up
and began to sprinkle. By the time I got back to my room it was
raining buckets. This seemed to set off a black cockatoo outside my
window, who flew from tree to tree screeching incessantly.

For dinner I'd already bought a ticket to
the Australia Day BBQ and aboriginal dance at the
Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre. The festivities had be hastily
re-arranged due to the rain, so we were treated to a prevew of the
evening's digeridoo while they moved the BBQ to somewhere sheltered
from the rain.

The BBQ was excellent ('roo, beef and sausage) and the
digeridoo I heard impressed me. I'd heard recordings, of course, and
Americans blowing into 'doos they'd brought from Australia, but I'd never
listened live to someone who really knew how to play. It's a whole
different experience: the 'doo is very directional, and the effects
of the changing sound as the player moves the instrument around gives
the experience much more presence than you can ever hear in a
recording. I wish I could have stayed longer ... but I had too much
to do before hitting the road in the morning. On the short trip back
to my room I was treated to views of herds of kangaroos grazing in the
fields on the outskirts of town.

I headed out fairly early Sunday morning.
I didn't have much of a plan: just drive back to Melbourne in time
to check in at the college and drop off the rental car.
I didn't expect to start the morning with one of the trip's great sights:
herds of emu grazing in fields by the side of the road below the
sandstone knobs of the Grampians peeking through the morning fog.
Lovely!

Halfway back to Melbourne, I stopped to check out the town of
Ballarat, but it was disappointing. Somehow I'd gotten the impression
of it as a scenic and remote mining town, akin to the California
desert town of the same name. But it was just an ordinary little
Victoria town, with some old buildings and a main street full of
pricy cafes and shops. I arrived back at Melbourne a bit earlier than
planned, which was just as well since it took four or five circuits of
the university before I finally found a way to sneak in to Trinity
college (as another car came out). I checked in to my room, dropped
off the Elantra, and joined a group of fellow conference-goers in
the search for linux.conf.au registration.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008

Geelong's great claim to fame is the Wool Museum. That gives you an
idea of what a happenin' place this is.

Its chief attractions were that it was (1) fairly close to the
beginning of the Great Ocean Road, that famous drive that everyone
tells you you have to see when venturing out from Melbourne, and
(2) I was able to book a reasonably priced room there online (via the
very handy Wotif).

I somehow managed to get through my stay without visiting the Wool
Museum, though, so someone else will have to report on that.

I wasn't originally planning to take the GOR. Not that I doubted its
beauty ... but the descriptions and photos sounded an awful lot
like Highway 1, the coastal road in Northern California. Not that
there's anything wrong with Highway 1 -- it's a great drive --
but after going halfway around the globe, I'd like to do stuff
that's significantly different from what you have at home.

But the recommendations seemed so universal, I gave in and decided to
try it. Gotta follow local knowledge, right?

So is the GOR similar to Highway 1? Yes. The ocean is a different
color, a shimmering aquamarine versus California's steely olive green;
and the plants are different (California has lots of imported
Eucalypts, but generally not on the coastal road. I did wonder whether
the trees in Victoria that look so much like the Monterey Cypress of
California's coast were native, or imports).

And the sea stacks are better: I won't claim that California has
anything that quite rivals the limestone majesty of the Twelve
Apostles, or the even more impressive London Bridge.

It's a nice driving road; while it would have been a lot more fun
in my X1/9, it was even fun in a rented automatic Hyundai Elantra.
There's a section in the middle where it goes inland for a while
(with an optional spur going off to a lighthouse) that reminded me
of some of the great driving roads in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Some of the ocean parts are less fun, mostly because they're so
narrow, yet so choked with tour buses and trucks pulling trailers,
none of which seem able to stay in their own lane.

All in all,, a fun but not not entirely exotic drive.
Do I regret it? Not at all. I had a lot of fun driving it and admiring
the scenery.
I ended the drive in the pleasant town of Warrnambool, a fun name to
say even if I seem incapable of remembering the spelling.

Fri, 25 Jan 2008

Of course I had to stop. How could you drive by a roadside stand
advertising the Giant Earthworms of South Gippsland and not stop?

Besides, Bill Bryson had written about it.

But the Giant Worm museum was a disappointment. They had a sign up
apologizing for not having any actual live giant worms on display
(it's an endangered species), so all they had was models and one yucky
preserved specimen in a jar.

It still was a fun stop, though. They have a little wildlife center --
not nearly as nice as the one on Phillip Island, but they had a very
tame and sweet baby wombat, and a shy but very cute baby wallaby.
Plus a variety of other animals like dingos, full sized adult wombats,
an assortment of kangaroos, cockatoos, pythons, etc. And ... alpacas?
Not something I normally think of as a native Australian animal,
but they were cute.

The worm stuff was fairly pedestrian in comparison. If you want to
learn about the Giant Earthworm of South Gippsland, either read Bill
Bryson's In a Sunburned Country or, better yet, rent the
appropriate episode of Life in the Undergrowth and let
David Attenborough fill you in on the details.

After leaving the worm museum, I headed over to the Mornington
peninsula (I'll let Bryson tell you about that, too, since I didn't
stop there) to take the car ferry across to Queenscliff.

I'd never been on a car ferry before, and was a bit shocked when I
found out it would cost me $57 to cross. Yikes! I probably would have
taken the long way round, had I known. But it's just as well I didn't
know, because then I would have missed the dolphins -- four of them,
escorting the ferry and playing in its wake. I'm sure it's nothing
unusual, but it my first time ever seeing dolphins in the wild.
When we landed at Queenscliff I found out that it's the place where
you go if you want to pay to "swim with the dolphins", so I guess
they're unusually tame there. I didn't stop to swim with them (nor
was I much tempted to take a dip, on a chilly overcast day); I was
on my way to Geelong to drive the Great Ocean Road.

One of the joys of travel is checking out regional newspapers to
see what the locals care about.
The morning after the Penguin Parade,
that meant the South Gippsland Sentinel-Times.

The Sentinel-Times features regular items like a page of
fishing news (some local kids caught a Mako shark)
and a page of farming news (an unusually high demand for heifers).
The week's editorial concerns a "former doubter" who
has his picnic/camping trip disrupted by a huge black feline,
three times the size of a normal house cat, skulking in the bushes
near the picnic tables. The writer elects not to leave the safety of
the car, and drives away. Now he no longer doubts people's
stories of huge black cats (apparently an ongoing issue in South
Gippsland). He still doesn't believe in UFOs, though.

But the top story in the Sentinel-Times is the new
desalinization plant being built against the protests of residents.
There were at least five different stories about it.
But isn't desalinization a good thing, in a region which is under
severe water restrictions already? Most of the articles assumed that
readers already knew the issues, but finally I found the answer:
the plant is far larger than needed for the region, it's feared that
it will have (unspecified) environmental impact upon the local ecology
and no environmental studies have been done, and, finally, the most
telling fact: the plant will be owned by an Israeli firm which will
own rights to the water.

Anyone remember Bolivia's water riots, when the peasants rose up
against foreign companies overcharging them for their own water?
Handing over local control of the water supply sounds like a bad plan.
I'd be against it too.
Good luck to the folk of South Gippy in their fight.

I'll just start with the summary:
the Penguin Parade is completely amazing.

Phillips Island, a couple hours' drive south of Melbourne,
is home to a colony of little penguins. (That's the species name,
not just a descriptive adjective, though it does describe them:
they're only about a foot tall.)

Little penguins nest in burrows in the rolling dune terrain above the
beach. They swim many miles out into the ocean on hunting trips, but
when they've eaten their fill, they come back to their burrows on the
island. They prefer to do this at dusk, to avoid diurnal predators
like hawks. So every night just after sunset, the penguins who have
been out hunting need to cross the beach and walk/run/waddle to their
burrows.

They're so regular about this that it has become a major tourist
attraction: there's a permanent viewing area where hordes of tourists
can watch the penguins on their daily journey. Wooden boardwalks over
the dunes. Floodlights so people can see the penguins better (the
penguins don't seem to mind). Tickets are sold, and there are scads of
bus tours from Melbourne. I mean, there are a lot of bus tours;
you can throw your back out just hefting a stack of all the brochures
from all the tour companies.

I was tempted to go the tour route. They take care of all that
driving-on-the-left stuff and figuring out where to go, and the
price isn't all that high when you compare it to car rental and
gas and ticket prices. But ... reading about the Parade I kept seeing
comments like "Stay a bit later and you'll get to see more" ... if
the Parade actually turned out to be something cool, I didn't want to
be shooed out early because the bus driver wanted to leave. Better to
have my own transportation and a room on the island.

So there I was, sitting on a concrete step at sunset in the chill
ocean wind. (The smarter folk stayed in the comfy warm visitor center
until past sunset.)
Silver gulls showed off their soaring skills inches above our heads, buzzing
the crowd looking for dropped bits of food. Kids jostled and fiddled.
(The little boy from the family in front of me on the steps wanted to
play with the little foam Tux Linux penguin hanging on my backpack.)

(I imagined the penguins, swimming around there in the ocean before us,
chatting with each other: "Every night, you can see thousands of humans
gathered on this beach. No penguin knows why they all gather here
and not at other beaches. But it's an amazing show, seeing all those
humans together. You just have to walk a little way up the beach to
see them.")

As the sky darkned and stars started to appear, a ranger stepped
forward and told us a little about the penguins and what we'd be
seeing. Then they played recorded messages in Japanese and Chinese
(though I heard more European languages than Asiatic in the crowd that
night). I didn't try to estimate the crowd. I heard an estimate of
two thousand, but I doubt it was anywhere near that high.

We were there at a good time, the ranger told us. There were lots of
chicks in the burrows, old enough that the parents were kept busy
foraging. That means lots of penguins crossing the beach.

But crossing the beach is a dangerous trip for a foot-tall penguin,
even if they wait until after sunset.
So penguins hang out in the shallows until there are enough of
them; then they all land together and make their way inland as a group.

The floodlights came on, but it was another ten minutes or so before
we saw the first penguins. A group of maybe ten tiny figures stood on
the rocks, obviously trying to work up the courage to proceed.
They'd move a few feet, to the next rock, then
stop for a while, working up the nerve for the next move.

Before long there was another, larger group assembling off to the
left, and then a third group. Group one finally made it
off the rocks and started heading for the dunes -- toward the
special boardwalk for the people who bought the $60 "Penguin Plus"
tickets. We proles in the cheap seats still had plenty to watch,
though, as a fourth and fifth group began to assemble. Pretty soon
there were groups of tiny penguins all over the beach making their
waddling way toward the dunes.

In the pre-parade talk, the ranger had told us that a lot of the
action is up in the dunes, the wooden boardwalks we'd taken on our
way down from the visitors center. Watch several groups cross the beach,
he said, but then go back up to the boardwalks and you'll see
plenty of action up there too. Indeed: now I understood the point of
the raised boardwalks, as we watched determined penguins following
trails right beneath our feet. Burrows were everywhere: a lot of the
burrows were just a few feet from a floodlit boardwalk filled with people.

The night filled with the warbling cries of little penguins searching
for a partner, chick or parent. A reunited pair would sing
a duet, caressing each other with their flippers and bills.
Other times, a penguin would climb to the wrong burrow, to be
driven off by the penguin already waiting there. Some penguins preferred
mansions in the hills, climbing determinedly up near-vertical gully
walls to reach a high burrow; others stayed down in the
easier-to-reach lowland slums.

There were other animals active besides penguins. As soon as darkness
fell, dark long-winged birds began flying by: short-tailed
shearwaters, the ranger told me. And in the darkness of the dunes,
penguins weren't the only animals moving between burrows: quite a
few rabbits (two or three times the size of the penguins) were
there as well.

And the penguins kept coming. An hour passed, and still the waves of
ten, twelve, fifteen penguins at a time struggled their
way up the dunes. Sometimes a straggler would collapse, exhausted,
and just lie there in the sand until the next group came along.
Sometimes a penguin would get a burst of energy and run to catch
up to the group ahead of them. A second hour passed, with no letup
in the supply of penguins. There must be thousands of them.

By about 11:15, the rangers started turning off the floodlights and
gently nudging people up the boardwalks. They weren't pushy about it,
but you could tell they wished we'd leave so they could go home.
There were only a few dozen of us spectators left by then, and a
kangaroo had wandered in from somewhere to watch the show.
(I'd had to stop for another kangaroo on the road on the way up
to the show. Very cool.)

A ranger answered a few last questions as we clustered on the concrete
pad next to the visitor's center.
Another ranger nudged two dawdling spectators to move to one side:
"Those penguins there are waiting for you to get out of the
way so they can cross." Indeed, as soon as the two gents moved aside,
one penguin left the group and waddled decisively across the tarmac
and into the dunes across the way.

Did I mention that the whole experience was completely amazing?

I was one of the last to leave, but I could easily have stayed for
yet another hour, watching soap opera stories of partners reunited,
chicks found and fed, wanderers lost and then found.

The next morning I drove out to "The Nobbies", the trail at the end
of the road past the Penguin Parade. Looking with new eyes, I realized
that the hill where the lookout stood, maybe 1500 feet above the water,
was peppered with penguin burrows. Indeed, as I started down the trail
I could see that some of the burrows were occupied.

The Penguin Parade was a magical experience. But the most amazing
thing about it is that it isn't anything unusual.
This happens every night. It's not the
same penguins from one night to the next: they'll go hunting for
several days or a week, come back to land, then stay that long in the
burrow before going out again.
But the thousands of penguins I saw ... there wasn't
anything special about the night I was there. You can go out there
any night of the year and see thousands of penguins swimming up out
of the water, landing on the beach and marching past you to their
burrows. Nothing special ... happens every night.

I'm in Melbourne, for Linux.conf.au.
But I'm spending the week before the conference exploring greater
Melbourne ... beginning with Phillip Island.

After a couple of days in Melbourne to recover from the flight,
I checked out of my hotel and faced the scariest task of the day:
schlepping across town to the rental car place carrying
all my luggage, fearing that when I got there they'd take one look
at my driver's license and say "Are you crazy? We don't give out
cars to people who only know how to drive on the right!"

But as sensible as that would have been, in fact they gave me the keys
to a Hyundai Elantra and directions out of town. I was on my way to
Phillip Island.

It took me a couple of hours to get there, being very
mellow and repeating "left, left, left" to myself. But in fact,
it turns out to be surprisingly easy to stay on the correct side of
the road, and Victoria's ubiquitous roundabouts actually make it
easier, oddly enough. The only hard part is keeping from wearing
out the windshield wipers, which stubbornly persist in coming on when
I flip the stalk where the turn signals ought to be.

Anyway, Phillip Island.
The point of going there is the island's famous Penguin Parade,
a huge tourist attraction involving watching penguins come up
out of the water and trek across the beach to their nests.
This happens at sunset, which was still many hours away, so I
decided to while away some of the time checking out the wild animal park.

The wildlife park is down a short dusty driveway. There were only
a couple of cars parked there, which surprised me since Melbourne
is full of brochures from at least ten different companies that run
bus tours to what sounded like the same place ("See koalas!
hand-feed kangaroos and emus!") It looked like the kind of place
you'd expect to find one tiny corral with a couple of sad,
moth-eaten animals enduring the hordes of tourists. But there I was --
might as well give it a chance.

I'm glad I did. The place is huge and has a very good selection of
Australian animals, kept in large pens and apparently well cared
for. I saw koalas, all right -- four of them, snoozing on branches in
the afternoon sun, barely more than an arm's length away from the
elevated boardwalk. I lost count of the different species of kangaroos
and wallabies, some of them in large pens and some just wandering
around at large, begging food from passing visitors. (A wallaby's
facial fur is very soft as it snuffles your hand; its back and
neck fur are coarser.)

The emus found out early on that I was an easy target. I fed the two
adults and two youngsters through a fence, only discovering later that
their enclosure also houses red kangaroos and you can walk in.
But when I tried, the emus recognized me and came running, to surround
me and peck at my pocket where the food was; eventually I
gave up and made my escape from the emu compound.

There were a few animals that remained hidden. Their two or three
Tasmanian devils were all in hiding, alas. But I got some close looks
at several animals I think of as fairly exotic: the echidna obligingly
came out and stood in a patch of sun to get his picture taken, and the
quolls were snoozing in a hollow log that was fortunately quite easy
to see from where I was standing (though too dark for photos).

All in all a very fun experience, made better by the
lack of crowds (I was very glad to have arrived at a time when no tour
buses were around, so I shared the place with three or four families).
I spent an enjoyable hour or so, leaving me plenty of time to wash
the wallaby spit off my hands, have dinner and drive out to the
Penguin Parade (which deserves a separate article).